A rose for Thelma: First 'elected' Rose Festival queen, from 1914, rules ever after

View full sizeSpecial to The OregonianQueen Thelma Hollingsworth in 1914

The second stop on a walking tour at River View Cemetery brings a visitor into the grand and silent mausoleum. Turn right into corridor 18, count up five rows from the floor. The marker for Niche 507-N is just under the skylight. A beam of sun warms the rosy marble.

Thelma O. Williams

1897-1984

Rose Festival Queen 1914

Beneath the words, her badge of office is affixed -- a bronze rose.

The program for the walking tour, though, says nothing more about her ... or of her long reign over the Rose Festival, not just in the year of her election but in nearly every year of her long life. She is, as far as the Royal Rosarians know, the only queen with a headstone noting her station in life.

This comes as quite a shock to Marilyn Clint, the Rose Festival's chief operating officer. In her office at Tom McCall Waterfront Park, she looks at the walking-tour program and shakes her head.

"I love Thelma!" Clint says. "She was the queen, and she carried it forever."

Clint pulls out a fat file of yellowed clippings, old postcards, old photos. From those bits and pieces arise a portrait of a woman who changed the spirit of the Rose Festival and set the model for the line of queens who followed her.

Today, the allure of tiaras and bouquets is dimming for many young women, for whom giving up six weeks in the spring of a high school year is an increasingly difficult sell. This year, several local high schools had trouble recruiting candidates for their princess courts, and Jefferson High School will not have a representative on the Rose Festival at all.

It wasn't always so.

For the first Rose Festival in 1907, the governor's daughter presided as queen. But organizers wanted their annual Portland party to echo Mardi Gras, so for the next six years, a mystery man reigned as Rex Oregonus, his identity under wraps until a big reveal at the end of the festival.

In 1914, a year of war and shortage, organizers deposed Rex Oregonus to restore the queen -- with a twist: Votes could be purchased, 10 for a penny, as a fundraiser for the festival.

Two dozen groups, including the police athletic association, Woodmen of the World, the Progressive Business Men's Club, even City Hall, backed candidates and organized their campaigns for the crown. Representing the Harriman Transportation Club of railroad workers was a petite, dark-haired 17-year-old file clerk for the Union Pacific railroad. Her name was Thelma Hollingsworth.

Of the monthlong race for queen, The Oregonian reported: "Seldom, if ever, has a voting contest in Portland attracted so much attention. A very large proportion of the people of the city took a personal interest in the ambition of some candidate. The organizations that nominated the different girls worked like beavers for their success. ...

"Club members bought votes for their respective candidates and they induced their friends to go and do likewise. The girls themselves got out and struggled like Trojans."

"Although a mere girl in years," The Oregonian wrote of the 5-foot-2 Hollingsworth, "she is, as the proverb says, 'every inch a queen.'"

The vote-selling raised $15,000 for the Rose Festival, which would be more than $300,000 in today's dollars.

Queen Thelma and her court of 11 princesses then went on a West Coast train tour that ended in her arrival for her coronation near a Willamette River barge. The Oregonian: "The Broadway, the Harriman and the Burnside bridges, through which the procession slowly moved, were packed to their capacity. 'Hurrah for Thelma!' came from thousands of voices."

Wearing a jewel-bedecked mantle train of blue silk, Queen Thelma alit from the barge and boarded a coach pulled by six dapple-gray horses. At the foot of her throne, "the moving-picture machines were in place and the camera fiends were crowding in close." A towering crown of pink rosebuds was placed upon her head, and the mayor presented the key to the city.

In 1915, a new Rose Festival queen was chosen, but the festival invited Thelma Hollingsworth to return. And she did so, year after year, often riding a float as the first "elected" queen of Rosaria, long after her 1925 marriage to noted high-school sports coach Wade Williams and even after the queen elections ended and the city's high schools began picking the festival royalty.

Joneal Harris, who lived next door to the Williamses for nearly 40 years, said, "Everything about Thelma just spoke so much to how she loved that Rose Festival. I can't tell you how proud she was." The Williamses had no children of their own; Harris said she believes Thelma's sister and her family directed that the mausoleum stone would bear her title, and the rose.

"She became an ambassador for the festival," says Clint, a Portland native who has worked for the Rose Festival for more than 30 years. "She was feisty! So quotable! Such a character!" As proof, Clint pulls out a photo from 1965. That tumultuous year, organizers tried to lure teenagers to the hip, happenin' Rose Festival, so someone came up with the bright idea of photographing Queen Thelma riding a skateboard. She was 68.

"She was always game for something," Clint says.

In 1983, the Rose Festival celebrated its 75th anniversary. Queen Thelma -- who Harris said was then "a very, very feisty little woman" -- was 86 and frail, but she donned a lacy dress donated by Meier & Frank and rode with 34 other queens who were the grand marshals for the Grand Floral Parade. She died the following year.

Clint looks again at the program for River View Cemetery's walking tour and the blank space under the name of Thelma O. Williams. She unveils a plan she has been hatching. She wants to hire an actor or recruit a volunteer to portray Queen Thelma this year, to recount the story of the 17-year-old file clerk who long ago became every inch a queen by a vote of the people and who with a bronze rose reigns ever after.